Most brand relaunches fail under the best of circumstances, and this one is especially challenging. The fact is the MySpace brand, if it is known at all, has become something of a joke among a good of the young people they seek to attract.

Where will Obama be if his administration's conventional methods are not up to the task of cutting through controversies that are engendered, at least in part, by reliance on conventional methods? That's when things could get very interesting.

I no longer work toward goals, I realized. Lately, I work for Lucy: Caring for her, organizing her care, working to pay for her care, making appointments, fundraising, advocating for her rights in her school district, changing diapers, keeping her safe.

History shows that if conservative papers weren't subsidized by deep-pocketed owners, they would fail in a free market. By contrast, at least until the current paradigm shift from print to online, newspapers dismissed as "liberal" had generally been thriving -- many of them under publicly owned companies.

In the same week that Pulitzer prizes were announced honoring the finest in American journalism, many in the far-right media worked to set news standards in mindless, awful behavior in the wake of the Boston attack.

Margaret Thatcher didn't listen, because to have listened might have diminished her absolute conviction she was right, as well as her determination to change radically the way Britain did business, regardless of the social fall-out. But her inability to listen would be her undoing.

When political parties embrace demagoguery and half-truth (and let's be honest, that's what Fox is doing), they do so at their own peril. Once you've sacrificed truth in the name of ideology, you've opened Pandora's box. The GOP opened that box, and what flew out was the tea party.

The Zimmer-Anderson school board race attracted national attention because it was seen as a test of the effort by corporate power-brokers to run schools like businesses, a strategy that they and the media misleadingly call "school reform."

The latest FCC official to get a job in the industry he used to regulate is Edward Lazarus, Chairman Julius Genachowski's former chief of staff. The Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday that Lazarus is the new general counsel of Tribune Co.